Pittsburgh Alpha to Omega

Liebe! Liebe! Liebe! ist die Seele des Genies.

Johann Caspar Lavater (b. 11-15-1741), Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe

Well, that and a little occult knowledge…

Love is an essential part of the story of the 1,100-ton mansion created from Florida coral and limestone. There’s a staircase carved out from a single piece of rock, a sundial, the world’s largest carved heart and a coral hammered into the shape of Florida — complete with a small pond meant to represent Lake Okeechobee.

Built over many years beginning in the 1920s, the Coral Castle seems like something erected by the slaves who built the pyramids or whoever it was who constructed Stonehenge. But the Coral Castle was allegedly built by a single, sickly, skinny man named Edward Leedskalnin, who just wanted to impress the girl he loved in his native Latvia. As he waited for his Agnes to come back to him, Leedskalnin’s love apparently empowered him to move mountains.

“Two-hundred-eighty-three people who lived in Homestead signed a notarized affidavit saying this man built this castle at night, alone,” said Rusty McClure, who coauthored the book, The Mystery of Ed Leedskalnin and his American Stonehenge.

The museum notes that Leedskalnin had an acute sense of balance and movement, as if that somehow might be enough reason to understand how a five-foot-six, 100-pound man could erect a nine-ton door that can be pushed by a toddler.

Or how a man believed to have grade school-level education could create his own electricity generator and his own radio from old car parts. Or make a sundial that accounted for the changing of the seasons.

Leedskalnin died alone in 1951, and took the secret of the Coral Castle to his grave — saying only that he gained the power to build it through something called “magnetricity.” Just what that was has fascinated everyone from geologists to purveyors of the paranormal to McClure himself, whose book is listed in the genre of “unexplained phenomena.”

“We don’t know the how,” McClure said. “But we do know the why. This is a love story.”

“Mysteries of love celebrated at mysterious Coral Castle” by Robert Samuels, Miami Herald 2-14-10

So who is Fulke Greville, and why is such an esteemed group of experts so convinced that he may be about to reveal extraordinary secrets from beyond the grave?

Greville, who was born in Stratford in 1554, ten years before Shakespeare’s official birth date, was without a doubt one of the most extraordinary men of his age.

Among a mind-boggling list of achievements he was a judge, a rear admiral in the Navy, an Army captain, an ‘intelligencer’ who travelled all over Europe recruiting spies for the Crown, a champion horseman, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite courtier and, in his latter years, Chancellor of the Exchequer under James I.

As far as Greville himself was concerned, however, his true calling was in the arts.

Indeed, his personal plea before his death in 1628 was that he wished ‘to be known to posterity under no other notions than of Shakespeare’s master’, according to a mid-17th century biography.

It is this claim, at once straightforward and obscure, which has led the historian A.W.L. Saunders to spend the past decade investigating Greville’s ties with Shakespeare.

In an exhaustive book, The Master Of Shakespeare, Saunders has identified 177 profile matches between the life and works of Fulke Greville and William Shakespeare.

These include that they lived in the same street, had the same friends, among them Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon, the same enemies and moved in the same literary circles.

Pointing out that Stratford-upon-Avon at the time had an adult male population of just 600, Mr Saunders argues that the chances of two men matching the same precise profile to such a degree are infinitesimal.

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‘Fulke spent the equivalent of £300,000 today on it, but he is buried elsewhere,’ Saunders said this week.

‘No man would build something like that and leave it empty, but his body was placed in the crypt below the church, not in the monument itself.

‘What you have to recognise about Fulke is that he was not only a great statesman, he was also a trained and highly effective spy, and as such was been familiar with codes and secret symbols.

‘Ben Jonson referred to his friend William Shakespeare as “a monument without a tombe”, and that is exactly what we have in the Chapter House at St Mary’s.

‘In his writings, Fulke left clear hints that he wrote the play Antony And Cleopatra, and that he had given it “a far more honourable sepulture than it could ever have deserved”.’

Again we are drawn to this astonishing monument.

‘There is also a strong body of evidence to suggest that Fulke was a leading Rosicrucian – a member of an esoteric society of mystics whose symbol is a cross of roses.

Many tens of thousands of Masons hold the sincere belief that Fulke was the first Grand Master of the Rosicrucian order – and a sword placed on the monument appears to bear its Rose Cross symbol,’ explains Saunders.

“A murdered spy and coded messages from beyond the grave…” by Richard Price, London Daily Mail, 2-11-10